Manage your subscription

The universal language of charades

IF KIM JONG IL plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush’s. For irrespective of their native tongue’s sentence structure, people communicate non-verbally in the same way.

Some languages build sentences using a subject-verb-object order&colon; mice eat cheese. Others, such as Korean, use an order more like “mice cheese eat”.

Susan Goldin-Meadow at the University of Chicago and her colleagues found that most people, regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, use the subject-object-verb construction to communicate with gestures (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 9163), suggesting that this …